“It’s not that,” Irma said. “I’m a little slow and I can walk just fine, but I can’t always remember what room I’m in. My neighbors get cranky when I go up and down the halls trying my key in all the doors until I find my own place. Short-term memory loss, they call it. Drives me batty sometimes.”
Joanna looked down at the sheets of paper in her hand and at all the desk-placement arrangements and at the coworkers’ names Irma Mahilich had summoned from that long-ago time. The old woman had been able to recall all kinds of pertinent details concerning her work life and her office mates from thirty and forty years ago, but in the present she was unable to remember the number of her own room.
“It’s room one forty-one,” Joanna said. “And I don’t mind taking you there.”
“Oh, no,” Irma said. “You go on about your business. I’m fine.”
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Joanna nodded, and let Irma do it her way. “Thank you so much for all your help,”
Joanna said. “But is there a time when I could come back and talk to you again?”
‘Anytime,” Irma said. “I’m always here. You’ll probably have to remind me of what this is all about, because I won’t remember from one day to the next. And bring those pieces of paper along with you. It helps me to have something to look at, something physical. As Hercule Poirot might say, that helps get the little gray cells up and working.”
Joanna went to the receptionist’s desk and then waited while a young Hispanic aide in a flowered smock stopped by the puzzle table to accompany Irma Mahilich back to her apartment. Watching their slow progress across the lobby and down a long corridor, Joanna Brady had a sudden awful glimpse of her own future. She could only imagine the vital businesslike young woman Irma Mahilich had been when she held court inside the PD General Office years ago, first as a clerk in the employment office and finally as private secretary to Otto Frayn, the local branch’s general manager.
Was Joanna doomed to have something similar happen to her? Would she one day come to a point when she’d be able to recall details of long-ago murder investigations from her days as sheriff and the names of all the investigators who had worked them while not being able to find her own way home? She hated to think about what a long, slow, debilitating decline like that would mean not only for her and for Butch, but also for her children -for Jenny and for the unborn child she carried in her womb.
And as she made her way to the Ciwie she had left parked outside, for the first time it occurred to her that, tragic as her father’s sudden death may have been, perhaps D. . Lathrop had
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been lucky to go the way he did. Seeing Irma Mahilich made Joanna think that there were far worse alternatives.
It was a subdued and thoughtful Sheriff Brady who drove into the Justice Center parking lot forty minutes later. She stepped into the lobby outside her office long enough to let Kristin know she had arrived, then she returned to her desk and started sifting through stacks of loosely organized papers.
She had barely made a dent in the first pile when there was a tap on the door. She looked up to see the hulking figure of Detective Ernie Carpenter filling her doorway.
The grim set of his mouth told her something was wrong.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Just had a call from University Medical Center,” he said, shaking his head. “Maria Elena Maldonado didn’t make it.”
“The little boy’s mother?”
Ernie nodded. “She died a little over an hour ago. They just now got around to letting us know.”
“Where’s Jaime?” Joanna asked.
“On his way to Tucson to catch his plane,” Ernie replied. “Why?”
Without answering, Joanna picked up her phone and dialed Frank Montoya’s extension.
“Meet Ernie and me over at the jail interview room ASAP,” Joanna told her chief deputy after passing along Ernie’s news. “The three of us are going to have a little chat with our friendly neighborhood SUV driver. You might want to bring along your tape recorder and a fresh tape.”
“Wait a minute,” Ernie said as he followed Joanna down the corridor. “If we’re going to ask him questions, shouldn’t we call his attorney?”
“Who said anything about questions?” Joanna returned.
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“We’re going to give that son of a bitch a message. He’s still jailed as John Doe, isn’t he?”
Ernie gave her a somber, questioning look before nodding. “That’s right, boss. We ran his prints through APIS and came up empty.”
Once at the jail, Joanna detoured long enough to stop by the booking desk before she met up with Frank and Ernie inside the jail’s stark interview room. Joanna took Frank’s proffered recorder and handed it over to Detective Carpenter.
“I’ll talk,” Joanna said. “Frank will translate. Ernie, you listen.”
They were standing, ranged silently around the perimeter of the interview room, when the shackled prisoner, walking with the aid of crutches and with his left foot in a cast, was led inside a few minutes later. The tape recorder, already running, sat on a table in front of Ernie Carpenter.
“Are you interested in having your attorney here?” Joanna asked as soon as the man was seated.
Frank translated the question, and the man shook his head. “I just want to go home,”
